


ten foot under (the surface)

by SenjuMizusaya



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Naruto
Genre: Angst, BAMF Tenten (Naruto), Badass Katara (Avatar), Canon Divergence, Character Development, Family Feels, Fluff, Friendship, Growing Up, Katara is determined to prove Everything, Katara takes no shit, Multi, Politics, Rebirth, Romance, Sexism, Smut, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, Violence, Water, Worldbuilding, team 7 still has problems as always, why is the naruverse so dark, you bet we're diverging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2019-08-27
Packaged: 2020-07-28 14:15:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20065378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenjuMizusaya/pseuds/SenjuMizusaya
Summary: Senju Katara was dark of hair and bright of eyes with too much insight and resolutions: the first one to gain control over her own life and the second to make sure the child with sunshine hair and whisker marks was not alone.(Or the one where the Senju Clan is still about to die out, but the child which was stillborn in one timeline is Katara reborn in an other.)





	ten foot under (the surface)

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own ATLA or Naruto!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first time I watched ATLA, Katara was my favorite for the reasons an eight year old girl would find important. The second time, when I was fourteen? Not as much, I fell in love with Zuko... But now it's been a year since the third time I watched the series and (admittedly after watching a character analysis of her, concerning her moral duality and character arc) this idea wouldn't leave me alone. She's inherently kind and _wants_ to be seen as kind, moral and caring as well, but we all know that the passion and willpower which drives her doesn't just back up her "light side" but also amplifies that dark, vengeful part of her. And I love the way that just because she's a strong girl, she doesn't deny her femininity (eg as Toph does), but rather embraces it. Many other female protagonists in general have to rough, sassy, masculine and tough in order to be seen as strong, but Katara doesn't. I like her subtle complexity. 
> 
> Now, moving on to the chapter itself, I think I should warn you that the narrative is confused and jumbled in the beginning, first because her new Senju mother isn't in the best mental state and then because Katara is very young (toddler years) and confused. Also, in many rebirth pics the person who is reborn retains all their maturity throughout the entire process of being a baby, then toddler, then child. Katara will be more mature than most others, though still a child. Because biology. Because fanfiction.

Senju Suiren was born to Senju Amaya, a dark young woman who'd reached the rank of Jounin on her twentieth birthday with no small amount of luck. The promotion could've been considered a stretch in terms in combat skills, but it was war and Konoha needed more ninja of higher rank, and thus many Genin found themselves Chuunin to be sent out as kunai fodder and various Chuunin ended up becoming Jounin in order to take on higher ranked mission. However, Amaya was pulled from active service within five months when she returned pregnant together with her teammate Senju Mizuji from a long-term mission spent on the archipelago surrounding Kirigakure like a maw of daggers. Mizuji, cousin and teammate and lover, died two days later in the hospital, quietly and painlessly.

Her child shared her looks, except for the hauntingly blue eyes, large and sapphire with swaths of the Kiri sea in which she'd bled and witnessed carnage of inhuman proportions. They belonged to a dead man and the Village whispered of her and Mizuji, with pity for loss and contempt for not marrying, with hidden barbs and gentle flowers and the honey poison of it clogged in her throat until oxygen couldn't reach her lungs and her fingers tingled, fingers which had been covered in gore and had wielded knives and now held a child with eyes reminding her of the disastrous mission to the Land of Water.

Senju Suiren shared her mother's dark brown hair, though hers showed signs of curling, and tan skin. She had five fingers per hand and five toes per foot, a dainty little nose and a baby's pudgy stomach, and although she was very quiet and stared around her with wide eyes which gazed too keenly, noticed too much, she wasn't sullen. She laughed and smiled and people cooed, friends congratulated, the Uchiha ignored and in doing so reminded Amaya that there were only women left now, her teammate and cousin was dead and there were so many of their rival Clan, a sea of black and white a dirty, bloody red.

Suiren did not speak much, not counting giggles and garbled fussing. (Perhaps that was because she was left at a crèche more often than not, where the matrons and patrons were too busy to talk much to their children: the silence of the Senju compound was more deafening than Iwa's Detonation Platoon and the supposed peace of being a housewife like being trapped in syrup. Amaya spent most of her time away on missions.) And when Suiren finally did speak it was to denounce the name she and Mizuji had agreed upon, discarded it as though it were a cloak and not the sole gift from partner to daughter. (The other things Mizuji had left behind was the mangled mess he'd been reduced to beneath a cascade of water and a meaningless scroll of drawings in a dusty old cupboard smelling of a now dead man.)

And Amaya frayed at the seams and hardened further until she was brittle edged and fracturing, a stone nicking everything which tried to embrace it, cold and dead and cut off from the cliff it had once belonged to. (But that cliff was extinct and the sole other family member not her daughter was a woman who'd left the Village and not even glanced back at her.)

Senju Suiren did not listen to her name. She'd pointed at herself and proclaimed "Katara", all the while those eyes (a dead man's eyes) which were wrong in her face stared and stared and stared, glued onto her like an enemy nin's attention, and her hair curled and waved like the sea of a misty land, as though Amaya's failed mission had weaved into the safety of family and home and transformed it into something horrifying, something which stole the security of Konoha from her by infiltrating into the very heart of the Village.

Senju Amaya knew that wasn't the case, knew that when those soft fingers wrapped around her wrist it was to comfort (so intuitive and perceptive at such a young age) and not for a ghost to remind her that she'd failed, that Mizuji was dead and would never return.

And so she always hugged her toddling daughter goodbye before a mission, kissed the top of that curling head she loved (Senjuhomesafe) and hated (deathbloodwrong) and left for the Hokage office to receive her mission from Namikaze Minato (or, should the leader of the Village not be there, either the replacing clerk or Nara Shikaku). And when she returned she would make salty broth with disgusting sea lion chops in because that was Suiren's favorite meal, sing her goodnight with a hollow voice as she smiled like she did during Clan meetings -all warmth but but no depth- because those blue eyes would be glued to her and try to comfort, try to assure, and it was all wrong, their blue light cut into her vessels and curdled her blood, seeped in below her skin like a wintry chill and wouldn't leave, stayed rooted as pinpricks beneath the surface.

Amaya had thought Konoha would always mean safety, and suddenly it didn't, roars shattered the air until it fell to pieces and smattered to the quaking ground together with the buildings, the Kyuubi towering over the world like an angry force of nature, all claws and teeth and fire and vengeance. Screams pierced what little was left of the air and the tang blood slicked the insides of lungs for every broken breath.

Senju Amaya returned inside a corpse scroll instead of in person, and the barely-toddler girl cried until a sea would have shivered and shied away from the bitter salt of her tears.

* * *

Katara had always known her mother was not the best of parents, too conflicted and damaged. But she'd loved her nonetheless, or perhaps just _because_ of that fact, and death struck her hard as always. It seemed that hadn't changed. War and death hadn't changed. Sexism had, but in the wrong direction. She hadn't changed, or at least not that much, for babies were always impressionable and had she not been open she would not have learned either language or customs.

She couldn't have been the easiest child either, but she'd tried, she'd wanted to be. (They had both tried, wanted and longed. And failed.)

Amaya had possessed familiar tan skin and brown hair, thick and straight like a waterfall of chocolate, but her hands had been the sort of calloused Sokka's had been and with unfamiliar nicks between the thumb and forefinger from what what Katara was learning came from throwing shuriken the wrong way. Old scars from Academy and Genin days which had and would never fully heal.

Katara wasn't a stranger to death, but she'd always had people around, family (even if it was Sokka, who could be more flubslug than human at times, but that was okay). Being alone, however, was foreign, almost more so than this new world she'd ended up in. And that world was one of chakra allowing impossible feats to be possible, allowing for too much power to be wielded within bodies, a world of new technology and a new language, customs and traditions and divisions. It was a world where she was alone. At a year and a half old, she'd lost a mother she couldn't remember much of, but enough for it to hurt like incandescent needles digging into her skin, her muscles, her veins, her heart and bones. She was unable to recall much, but certainly more than somebody her age should. It most likely helped that she had an avid imagination and that those taking care of her were prone to reminiscing about her parents, as though that would change anything, make it better, make them seem like jolly aunts and uncles even though they were not. Would never be, could never be. 

Yamanaka Gina had hair of the sort Katara had only ever seen on Yue before, pale like moonlight and white gold, effortlessly smooth and silky, and eyes a shade closer to compressed blue ice than her own. They were pupilless, and it had once unnerved a young Katara to no end, those endless blue pools which could see even though they shouldn't. Gina doted and fussed and only took missions together with her two closest friends on Friday afternoons, usually involving gardening, sorting herbs for the hospital or other botanical tasks. She was the one who was related to Senju Mizuji, albeit distantly, and the general consensus was that the unusual shade of Katara's eyes was a remnant from her own infinitesimally small Yamanaka lineage. Gina had no children of her own and although the young Senju had no doubt the blonde cared for her, the prestige aspect was too prominent for it to be actual love.

_("And this here is Senju Suir- sorry, Katara, my ward," and the fingers would hold onto her shoulders just a little too tightly and the most undertone was put not on correcting to Katara, but on the word my.)_

_("Yes, is she not lovely, and the last one, too." And she's mine.)_

_("Be presentable, it's a formal gathering- oh, how lovely you look, the color brings out your eyes, must be the Yamanaka eye for color. We've quite disproved the joke that not even a Yamanaka can improve the Senju's sense of fashion." I did that.)_

_("It's quite the honor to raise a child descendant from the Founders." And I'm the one doing it.)_

Yamanaka Isamu was rarely home, but when he was he was often tired, deep lines stretching from his eyes like cracks and the creases framing his mouth almost waxy. He would hoist her up and let her sit on his shoulders, quiet and content to be together with somebody warm and untainted, who didn't pester or prod. Katara had quickly garnered he worked in a Capture and Detain squad, but knew there was no war so why was the one who cared the most never home? The three year old girl didn't understand why he wouldn't be home with his small family when that was obviously what he wanted the most. He didn't have to take on as many missions he was currently doing, not unless he didn't truly want to be with them, not unless he was selfish enough not to wonder what they might be feeling, not unless he didn't actually care about them.

The thoughts festered and hurt and dug, because she loved him, wanted him to return it, wanted to know why he would choose a haunted look in his eyes and blood on his hands instead of basking in Gina's affectionate gaze or allowing himself to let Katara conjure laughter and smiles from him.

"Is there a war?" She finally asked him, abrupt and to the point and all the other accompanying questions directed against him like a mute, icy wave. Her usual warmth was gone and there was something raw, direct in her gaze and stance as she looked up at him. They sat on a bench in the lush Yamanaka gardens, butterflies flapping their wings like crepe paper dancing in the wind.

He thought about it, then smiled softly: "No, there's no war."

But there wasn't peace, either. And maintaining a status of not-war required ninja, and as her surrogate father was one he was called out, his services required. Gina, on the other hand, was a woman and therefore excused from active duty. Katara searched, observed and puzzled together that during the Third Shinobi War, during which she herself had been born, the slender young Yamanaka had been working with Reconnaissance and Infiltration, which included an unfortunate seduction which ended up with a pregnancy and miscarriage, as well as the news that should she end up with another child, her frail hips would give in and she would end up permanently disabled in the best of scenarios, dead in the worst and most likely one.

Her hand slipped into his and held on tight.

"Don't they want peace?"

"Doesn't who want peace?" But he hadn't denied the absence of peace and they both knew it.

"The leaders, the Kage, the commanders and Councils and everyone." Her eyes stood bright, both with hope and anger. "They keep on talking about it as though it's here but it isn't. Otherwise the graveyard wouldn't keep on growing like it does and people wouldn't be so scared."

Otherwise people wouldn't come home from missions to scrub their hands because the blood wouldn't go away until actual blood dripped into the sink like strawberry jam onto cream. Otherwise children too young to be forced to kill would't know how intestines slipped and slithered onto the ground when the stomach was cut open.

"Because we're a ninja Village," he sighed, the frank cynicism of it bitter enough to be toxic. "And if the world were truly peaceful, truly harmonious, there would be no use for us and both our profit and existence would disappear."

And Katara hated, hated like a blizzard storm and pelting hail, hated like torrents of rain drowning away villages and cities into mudslides, hated like she'd hated Yon Rha crumpled in the mud at her feet. 

But she also loved, tender and warm like nourishing spring rain making plants grow. She loved the way the sun stroked the verdant greenery and plentiful canopies, the mismatched roofs of Konoha and the laughing children she played with on the streets. She loved the idea of everybody being leaves of the same tree, of having the same yearning and passion for greater unity and good. For all its faults, there was also good. There was protection. There was family.

Or at least something akin to it.

* * *

At four she shuffled into the Academy together with her equally round-faced age mates, soft and small and wide-eyed. They learned to read and write and played games assigned by the sensei: had she been anybody else she would not have realized that hide and seek, tag and roughhousing was preparation for actual training. The kunai they got to practice with were dull and wooden. She excelled in the classroom and was a good athlete, yet she kept on dropping any weapons she was meant to hold at the slightest thing. The knowledge that they were all going to be sent out to kill at some point made her veins freeze until rime frost threatened to cut her open and unleash her inner turmoil during kunai practices.

Whenever teamwork was required, she was often paired with a girl who was the opposite of her in terms of inclinations though similar in affability. Where Katara was patient and hungered for knowledge, Tenten constantly moved from one thing with avid though short-lived curiosity, and though the both loved playing, the Senju girl possessed a competitive streak which ran through her like lava and stone while her friend was content to run when she felt like it and be captured (or, were she the hunter, give up) when she got tired. And where Katara showed distaste and lukewarm aptitude for anything which involved weaponry or handling objects, Tenten more than excelled at it, her aim notable for her tender age and bullseye clearly soon to be the expected outcome. 

At five almost everybody passed the final test and was moved up to the next class: two stragglers did not, one quitting the Academy altogether and the other redoing the year.

At five Katara learned that Tenten had no last name not because she was an orphan, but because she was the result of a late night at the bar toward the brutal end of the war, her mother hooking up with en equally drunk, equally tired and equally desperate man, both longing for escape, for contact, for affection, to drown away everything else for a moment.

At five Katara picked up A Shinobi Handbook: Ninja Rules and read it, truly read it, traced the black print and worried her bottom lip. It was bruised from where her Inuzuka opponent had struck her during the spar, but she'd given him hell and won after kicking him out of the sparring circle due to sheer persistence and her promisingly fast reaction time. 

"Isamu-san," she spoke up after dinner, the finished book neatly placed in her backpack to be brought back to the library. "Why are we told to care for our comrades and find, ah, solace and strength in bonds, while at the same time bury and erase our emotions? How does that work?"

"The world is made up of contradictions," he started in that slow way of his, as though it took a while to get the engines going, "but I see it as having a choice. Caring and being emotional can distract you, but not daring to let yourself feel makes everything else worthless."

Katara spent the rest of the evening in the pond, swimming until the sky was dark and the stars shone like a spray of liquid diamonds, the air chilly and nipping wherever it had access to bare skin. She escaped it by diving down, deep down, until only the water embraced her and soothed her, reminded her. 

Promised her. 

At five she learned it was best not to tease any Uchiha, because while she could handle the boy who'd fire her snooty glares in the back of the class, when he was picked up by two older brothers and a cousin who all tried to level her to the ground with their eyes alone it seemed wiser not to evoke any further reaction.

At six she got to practice with real, sharp kunai of stainless steel and they started throwing wooden shuriken and targets: though she was clearly mediocre at knives, shuriken came naturally and it filled her with the pride of doing well and the distaste of what it meant, the knowledge sour on the back of her tongue. On multiple occasions she'd wondered why she did this, why she practiced to end up doing what she despised, but always ended up on the same square again and again: the alternative was worse. The alternative was being controlled by others, and they didn't spare her as a person a second glance.

Their eyes were on the future and a rising Senju clan.

_("She's promising and talented, I hear, imagine her sons-")_

_("She's sensible, hopefully she'll be sensible about what's best of the Village and settle down early to rebuild her clan-")_

_("She'll be a beauty, I wager, though there'd be no difficulties finding the last Senju a match even if she had been unsightly, since-")_

At six, Katara whipped out a handful of shuriken and hurled them at the civilian Clan head who was whispering in the ear of a vaguely listening Yamanaka Inoichi. At six, the five weapons embedded themselves around him, pinning his sleeves and collar to the wall behind him. At six, her eyes blazed and glowed with unbridled fury because she was fucking six and that bastard was talking about how his son was eight and that she should get kids with him when she grew up because _priorities_.

Katara was six and she snarled: "The next time it'll be through your throat."

Tenten declared her to be the awesomest girl ever and proposed with a candy ring. Katara accepted and they at the candy together: it was lemon and raspberry flavored. They were best friends and being engaged meant she'd be free from that kind of pestering forever and ever, the candy ring a bubble of good embracing them in a world made up of shadows and shards.

* * *

At seven, Katara could recognize her old self in the mirror. She grew up the same way she'd done the last time, but it was odd to see the youth of it and know what was to come. Her hair was in a simple braid which Gina was convinced she only wore because Senju Amaya's trepidation of her curls had leaked to her one way or another. What her old mother had thought of her waves and curls had nothing to do with her decision: it was practical and pretty, and she didn't want to wear it short or have it flutter in the way. She wore a pale blue kimono shirt with white linings and gray pants which were almost the same color as her sandals, which were a shade darker and closer to brown.

It was a balance of the past and present. Balance had been key in her past life: balance of power, balance of her own two sides, balance of nature. 

Uzumaki Naruto knew no balance. 

"I'll crush you!" 

He was pint-sized, with an expressive face whose cheeks were scarred and rendered whiskered in appearance, a mop of spiky golden hair flopping around and gritty hands currently clenched together into tight fists as he sprinted after the much faster, much healthier bully who'd stolen his meager lunch box.

Katara received carefully prepared bentos each day, with prettily arranged patterns and octopus sausages, as did just about all at the Academy. Or at least more than the old rice with leftover chicken strips which Naruto had brought along. She didn't know all names of those in the class below her: there was Yamanaka Ino, heiress to her surrogate Clan, and her two future teammates and respective Clan heirs from the Akimichi and Nara Clans though their first names escaped her, as well as a Hyuuga heiress and the most hated child in all of Konohagakure no Sato, Uzumaki Naruto.

Over the last few weeks, she'd noticed him. Seen him in the shadow of the great, gnarled tree through the window when zoning out in case the sensei was explaining something she already knew (being raised by a Clan was a blessing, a privilege, she'd deduced that very quickly).

"Hey!" She grabbed ahold of the sturdier boy's coat when he ran past, the thin material clenched tight in her fist and the captive almost stumbling at the abrupt halt. "Give it back to him, he's hungry." 

The boy sneered into her passive face, standing just as tall as her. He laughed, as though reminding her of a joke and finding her interference annoying: "It doesn't deserve to eat!" 

"He's a him, not an it," she objected, holding tighter and she could feel the hem protest beneath her short nails. "Stop being mean!"

"Let go of me," he demanded instead, eyes narrowing when Naruto finally caught up, wrenching his lunch back with glassy eyes and a furious sort of hurt washing across his golden features. 

Katara let go. 

The boy, all confusion and wrath which must have been passed down from his parents (that was from where most anger at Naruto originated), glanced between the two: one was a tremble-lipped boy with dangerously flashing eyes clutching his lunch, the other a wide-eyed girl in soft blue. He reached out to yank pettily at her braid for revenge before setting off again, but before he could as much as touch it, let alone tug, her leg flashed out and swept his feet from beneath him whilst pushing his shoulder blades forward, making him fall face-down to the ground. 

"Now stop being a jerk!" 

She took a step back, closer to the warily observing blond. The lunch-thief scrambled to his feet and set off, legs pumping as quickly as possible until he disappeared into the sea of people going about their business on the wide street where the market was set up, stands lining the way with smells and colors exploding to the senses. 

"I'm Katara," the brunette turned to Naruto, taking his free, dirty hand and helping him back to his feet. She informed him, serious: "You should eat more, Naruto-kun, then you'll become stronger and bigger." 

He regarded her with suspicion, awe and thinly veiled hope. "Imma eat all the time then, dattebayo!" 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear Katara isn't all angst and anger. Pinky promise. 
> 
> I haven't got a clue what to do with life at the moment, but I'd rather spend my time writing than worrying about the future right now.
> 
> Naruto's entry was meant to be longer, more dramatic and far more emotional. That didn't really work out but at least I dived right into this story?


End file.
